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Twelve years ago Dallas investment banker, Gary Boren, sat in Reunion Arena wondering why highly paid professional basketball players could make gravity defying shots and then miss a simple free throw shot. Today, the mild mannered and unpretentious
Boren is the Godfather of a widely acclaimed free throw system used by the Dallas Mavericks.
Boren has spent the past nine years as a player development coach with the Mavericks and is the only free throw specialty coach in the NBA. He says the statistics prove that free throws make a difference in a game, There's no question. It's over twenty-percent of all points scored are free throws. Every tie game where they go into overtime, every single one of those is basically decided with one more free throws. And they would have won the game and wouldn't even have gone into overtime if they had made earlier free throws.
With a video camera in hand at the Mavericks practice facility beneath the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Boren says the free throw, Is one of the most over looked and under coached skills of the game. Players have seen miles of tape of themselves running and shooting up and down the court throughout their careers, but most have never seen themselves shoot the free throw.
As a result of Borens system, Dallas ranks among the best free throw shooting teams in the league. shooting free throws in the empty gym. Boren kept shooting until he could sink five hundred free throws a day.
Boren also consulted a mathematician. They worked out the geometry of the problem starting backwards from the basket to the player standing fifteen feet away at the free throw line. The equation factored in the ideal angle at which the twenty-three-ounce ball should approach the eighteen inch diameter hoop thats mounted ten feet above the floor.
Boren calculated that the best chance of sinking a free throw depended on shooting the ball with a high rainbow style arc. To accomplish that feat, Boren broke down the mechanics of the perfect free throw into forty-one parts.
Borens work starts in the fall at the beginning of the Mavericks season with a private videotaping session of each players free throw shots. Boren records from four different angles: front, side, rear, and from the side at basket level.
Boren says he wins over the players confidence in his system by telling them,
I am making you the head coach of your own free throw shot. I show them what they are doing and I give them a little logic and they say I want to fix that. I'm not here because I can shoot. My value is I can teach shooting to these guys. I'm not going in the game anytime soon. 
DALLAS MAVERICKSProving the doubters wrong
Ager, Barea, Bass, Dampier, Diop, Fazekas, George, Hassell, Harris, Howard, Howard, Jones, Nowitzki, Stackhouse, Terry
